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The UK ONS (Office for National Statistics) has released the latest annual release of Key Statistics, part of its suite of products on regional trends and snapshots. These reports have been paper publications since 1965 but are now produced online with data updated every two to three months.

Key Statistics provides demographic, social, environmental and economic statistics at regional level for England and the devolved administrations to allow for comparison between the countries, regions and local authority areas. The data are used by central and local government to help with planning decisions, by academics who quote regional level figures as well as students, businesses, the voluntary sector, the media and the general public.

Chuka Ilocha who works in the Local Economic and Social Analysis team within the Crime, Regional and Data Access Division says: “The reports complement the other statistics we provide at local authority level and although we haven’t publicised the release, our web metrics show that over 2,000 people have downloaded the data since it was released three weeks ago.”

Background

Pembrokeshire County Council has a long-held ambition to put data into the public domain in a usable and easily-understandable format. Much of this data has geographic information and it has been a natural development to use data visualisation.

Getting started

Once the council had decided to use InstantAtlas the team set about creating Statistical Maps and Tables – the section of the council’s website devoted to data sharing. “We thought about everyone who would be using it from members of the public to council employees,” he says.

His first impression of InstantAtlas was that the ability to carry out analysis over time would be particularly helpful to users. The first report Adam worked on was job vacancies which used data such as claimants for Job Seeker’s Allowance and he said it was straightforward once he got the data from ONS and Nomis.